Comments

Wednesday, 25 June 2014

I had a shock today when I read how Marion Zimmer Bradley
protected her pedophile husband who committed serial sexual abuse and how her
daughter has been saying that the fantasy writer was violent and sexually
abused her too.

Like the writer Jim Hines who wrote the blog with all the details, I
was a big fan of Zimmer Bradley who opened up the Arthurian mysteries to me.
The world she portrayed was full of strong feminist figures fighting against
some really unpleasant male aggression.
Now that world and those characters and world is dead to me. They are the creations of a writer who did
not mean a word of it. Her fantasy
worlds were not an expression of what she believed.

What is also strange is how there is a movement among her
fans to say that this does not matter, what matters is the worlds and
characters she created. Equally there are those who say that Bradley and her
husband should not be judged because the matter has been “dealt with.” Besides

Zimmer Bradley was a victim of her own mother so surely that gave her the right to repeat the pattern etc..

But a writer is, in some ways, a God, or a magician. Everything that happens in a book is a
creation of the writer. To write a novel
is to expose yourself to the reader.

In the Zimmer Bradley case the writer is a hypocritical god…
she is not her heroines, but the cruel abusers. She is not the struggling
feminist icons but the oppressor. Needless to say this turns Zimmer Bradley’s
books on their heads and makes them effectively unreadable.

In her books it is the heroines who hold the magic and not
the oppressors and what Zimmer Bradley is effectively projecting is her own
cruelty against her magical self. She is
unconsciously aware that the two things are mutually incompatible. You cannot be a magician and be cruel to the
innocent.

Now you can be a magician and an arsehole. Being a magician does not stop you being
arrogant, violent, intolerant, rude, or anything that many in the new age world
says you should not be. But there seems to be a line after all, one where you
stop being a magician and become something else. That line appears to be one of
cruelty to another person or form of life for your own aggrandisement. If you contribute to wrecking another’s life,
then like Marian Zimmer Bradley’s universe, your magical world collapses. Suddenly you lose the right to speak because
the world has seen your hypocracy. The
magic might continue, but really the spirit of it has gone.

Watchers of the Dawn ran a story about how one of the heads of the AO
Order in Ireland had been sentenced by a court for collecting child porn. If
true and it seems to be, not only did the head of the Order David Griffin know
about the man’s convictions but also he expelled three members for daring to
complain about it.

Like the Zimmer Bradley case we are being asked to look away
by those who are “fans” of that system.

On Facebook, the writer Fr Barabbas, who always takes the
role of Griffin’s apologist, said that it was not up to anyone to judge someone
who had already been sentenced and punished in a court of law. (Of course you could use the same logic to say that you should not judge someone who has NOT been found guilty in a court of law) Another person
suggested that the story was just part of the Golden Dawn Flame wars and people
should really be getting on with each other.

But really, like the Zimmer Bradley case, the magic dies
when you hear of such things.

Wednesday, 18 June 2014

Attached is an old article I wrote for the Horus Hathor Temple in Nottingham when I ran it. I found it on my computer this morning so I thought I would put it here.

In the UK there is a term
which means something is completely untrue, or a waste of time.It is called 'bollocks' and it is considered
a rude word which you are not supposed to use in polite company.It is the complete opposite of the phrase the
'dog's bollocks' which is said to mean something very good – particularly for
the dog.

Popular culture is built on
bollocks. It sucks you into a morass of TV chatshows, Jerry Springer and
reality game shows. It is bollocks that television presenters can do up your
home or that you will be better if you look like they say you should. It is bollocks that you should take drugs to
make you 'normal' or that is wrong to be depressed occasionally. It is bollocks
that your flight is somehow safer because you took your belt off and let
someone sniff your trainers. Soap operas are temples of bollocks that we
sacrifice our brain, time and souls at its virtual altars.

Popular culture demands not
only that we build our lives on bollocks.
We are encouraged to look away from things that are sensible and well
thought out in search of bollocks answers to everything.

Occultists consider
themselves outside the mainstream. They
are supposed to look at the unseen world and find a measure of reality that is
unseen by other people. But despite
this, popular culture seeps into their reality too. Despite our attempts to be outside the system
we cannot escape it.

This has lead many modern
magicians to say “if you can't beat them join them” Is it possible to turn the
symbols of popular culture into something we can use.

The logic is that if modern
popular symbols are archetypes it should be possible to use them to key into
the same forces that were opened by older symbols.

However this is not as easy
as it appears. Older symbols are often
hard-wired into the consciousness of humanity.
They are based on beliefs held by our ancestors for thousands if not
millions of years. This gives the
symbols a depth which more recent symbols cannot quite match.

For a long time I followed
the view that a symbol was a symbol. It
did not matter which one you used so long as it meant something to you. In the spirit of experiment to prove this I
did two rituals. The objective was to remove negativity in a particular
area. In the first rite I used pop
culture symbols of Star Trek New Generation.
It was a great laugh, I got to
play Picard. The negativity was
visualised as a Borg cube which was destroying the area. The ritual was effective. Energy from the phaser banks was seen belting
out of the East of the temple by more than one of the temple psychics. In short
it did what was expected and was a lot of fun.

The control ritual was one
using heavy cabbalistic symbolism, neo-platonic symbolism with a bit of alchemy
thrown in. It was less of a ritual and
more of a pathworking, but it also was designed to send a burst of spiritual
energy outwards to smash up a negative thought form. It did this to the same technical standard as
the other ritual. One could say well that was proof that pop culture symbols
worked just as well as the traditional ones.
But it didn't.

When the ritual officers
asked which they thought was the most effective they all felt it was the
classical ritual. The felt that the
symbols gave them more to grab hold of.
While the Star Trek rite amused them and intellectually they could
understand the logic of the symbols it failed to move them emotionally like the cabbalistic version. So my experiment failed, it seemed that it
was not entirely possible to root a magical system in popular culture
symbols. They were simply not deep
enough to carry it off.

Does this write off then the
use of popular culture symbols within magic?
Not at all. But it is not simply
a matter of replacing your rituals with popular symbols you have to
alchemically wire it into the collective unconscious yourself. In short, you have to turn bollocks into
gold.

This has been done before,
and will probably be done again in the future, with the myth of Atlantis.
Popular culture has muttered that Atlantis was a real place for centuries, but
in the 19th century the literal idea of this place really took off,
with the works of the Theosophical Society.
One of the people heavily influenced by this teaching was Dion Fortune
who became convinced that she was an Atlantian adept in a past life. She worked
with the symbol of Atlantis and made it into a system.

This lead to a funny incident
in the 1980s there was a very famous collective of magicians that used to meet
around a residential centre called Hawkwood.

They had heard a legend that
when Atlantis had sunk, the Solar Logos, which in Dion Fortune's system ruled
the solar system, had decided that it did not want some of the Atlantian adepts
to re-incarnate because they were too evil.
It stuck their souls on a comet with an incredibly wide orbit around the
solar system, to gnash their teeth until
the solar system was ready for them.

It is not clear where the
legend started from. It has all the
hallmarks of a channelling session, but it could have come from Dion Fortune's
own Inner Light. However the story got
several of these famous magicians thinking.
It seemed to them after a few thousand years the Atlantians should have
sorted themselves out and should be ready for an incarnation or two. They meditated, and prayed, about the idea
and got a good feeling about it. Those
who channelled the Secret Adepts of Power also got the nod from their contacts
for the project.

So they met at Hawkwood with
a plan to do a huge ritual to save the Atlantian evil adepts. The ritual was set up, everyone was robed,
but all was not well with the bloke in charge of the ritual. He was starting to have a few doubts. What if the Solar Logos was not happy with
the idea of pulling these people back into incarnation? What if he was releasing a plague of terrible
evil on the world? The rite opened and
in the West the priestess made her contacts and poured power into the thought
forms that were supposed to draw the errant Atlantians back onto the
planet. There was a pressure
building. The Mighty Magus of Power had
broken out into a sweat. Suddenly he
knew he wanted to do this ritual about as much as he wanted someone to jab red
hot needles in his eyes. He decided
that the Inner did not want the ritual to happen and used an emergency ritual
shut down technique that delivered his fellow magicians to earth with a bump.

The Priestess, speaking words
of her contact, said: “Priest you have failed” and stormed out of the temple
room only to faint when she got into an outside corridor. Many of the other officers felt physically
sick and the ritual when down in legend as one of the ones which went bang.

But no one seemed to have
paused before the ritual took place and thought; evil Atlantian magicians on
comets that is complete bollocks that is! Nor did they consider what would have
happened if the ritual had been completed.

The idea of the souls of
these adepts being stuck on a comet by the God of this solar system did not seem
funny or odd to them. Even if accept
this bollocks they even had to accept other things that they did not
believe. They would have to believe that
the soul could be attached to a physical reality. Further that the Solar Logos,
or Sun, might consider some humans too evil to allow them to re-incarnate. This would mean that the Solor Logos woke up
one morning and decided to abandon the law of karma for these evil sods. Adherents of this flavour of occultism are
great fans of karma.

Yet they disabled all of
these 'common sense' structures to accept a pop-culture myth and then allowed
it to effect them so deeply that one of them passed out when it 'failed'. Why?
Well it was all about faith. It was
serious magic to them. What
normally would have been popular culture symbols had been rooted into their
belief structure so deeply that they were wired to the archetypes. They were able to take the symbols and use
them in a way that I was not able to hit with my Star Trek ritual.

This 'faith' built out ideas
in other areas. I know of four people who claim to be the priestess who guided
the ships from the sinking Atlantis to the shores of Britain. The first was Dion Fortune who invented that
version of the myth. Others have been
those who often are not aware that Dion claimed that role for herself and think
they must have done it because they are such shit hot psychics. However the Atlantis myth also developed into
a system of magic based around geometric shapes. Each shape was held to have a magical virtue
and officers in a rite were told to hold lines in this pattern. The idea was to make the shape light up on
the astral. Now this idea is really
superior because it shows that the bollocks has been refined into pure
intellectual magical gold. It is producing
something incredibly useful that could be adapted outside of that particular
system. The probably owed a lot to the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but that is not so important to the people
who are using this system.

Popular culture can also
motivate esoteric people to do workings that they normally would not
consider. As the world readied for the
First Gulf War there were a number of magical groups that responded by doing
rites for victory. Some responded by
digging up copies of Dion Fortune's Magic Battle of Britain book which
described the setting up of wards around Britain during World War Two. What was interesting about these groups was
that they had apparently ignored the fact that the Dion Fortune defence rituals
were designed to protect Britain from invasion from the Nazis. There was no way that the Iraqi army was ever
going to fight its way through Europe to besiege Britain. But what they were
doing was responding to a stirring in the popular culture that felt that
Britain was being attacked. This was, of
course, bollocks but it added power to the working that perhaps logic alone
would not have provided.

So how is it possible to
redeem a popular culture symbol so that it can be used to the same magical
level. The Atlantian working was based
on faith. The people practising were
certain that it must be true and therefore made it happen. The Gulf War working was based faith based on
war propaganda and mass hysteria. These
are things that are very difficult to mimic in the regular working of a
magician.

Using neo-platonic
thought, the reason for this is a symbol
is not a single object but a gateway to many other objects that link to single
divine idea. Look at it this way. One day a creator God, let us call him Jeff,
decides to create beer. He does not
visualise a pint of something wet, hoppy, refreshing, lager or dark beer. He thinks about everything that beer is and
conceives it as a symbol. A primal
symbol of all beerness. This image flows
towards manifestation and gives birth to other symbols that make for different
types of beer and flavour until there are legions of different types for
creation to use.

Popular culture symbols are a
bottom up creation. They make links
based on other symbols. Picard is is not
wired into the Universal archetype for leadership, he is a symbol of other captains who show these
qualities. The Borg are not the
archetype of a mechanistic collective, they are based on human societies where
these ideas have gone wrong.

But a divine idea which
attracts more ideas to it over time.

Popular culture symbols might
track a way to becoming archetypes over time, but the very nature of popular
culture is that it is ephemeral and will pass into history.

But the magician will not let
that stop them. Equipped with a
knowledge of how these things work, it is possible to connect popular culture
symbols to more primal ones. It will
take some doing and will probably only be personal to you, but it will make
symbols from popular culture carry the same weight as those older and more
traditional ones.

Firstly you have to do some
internal wiring and this requires some meditation. Take the symbol that you wish to redeem and
stare at it for some time. Allow it to
create some 'ideas' in your mind. So if
we use Buffy, we allow the idea of being a chosen one roll around in our
mind. We think of a few of the
adventures she has had etc. Then try to
think what she is a symbol of.
Compare and reject those other
heroes who do not fit the qualities you
find interesting about her. So Alexander
the Great for example was a 'Chosen One' but he led armies fighting humans and
while Buffy only had a small gang fighting evil. It does not quite work. If you think that it is vital for the
archetypal 'Buffy' to be a female hero then you will have to find a heroine who
fits. Remember, you do not have to use
humans, myths and legends, gods and goddesses will all work.

Once you have selected a
'hero' then you start to look at the qualities that hero has which makes them
represent what you want to use.

Say we decided that Buffy,
with her super powers and tendency to rush into dark places to fight evil, has
enough links to be similar to the symbol of Hercules. What is it that Hercules has that connects us
to the ideas of heroism? We might generate a list – bravery, leadership, not
fleeing in the face of monsters, or being eaten by them and, above all, a
strong sense of humanity.

Now, in our mediation, it
gets a bit tricky. We have to take these
qualities and ascend upwards with them.
The process makes them more abstract.
Generally I see the symbols as becoming geometric shapes but they
radiate feeling. Allow the shape to move
upwards and follow it in your mind's eye toward a single point of light. That light has symbolically to be damn
big. It represents the singularity of
the creator... in my case Jeff. In that
light you should see the shape changing before settling on a single shape. You might want to note that shape, before
allowing it to come back. Watch it
change, moving from primal shape, to new forms, separating out into different
beings, heroes, linking to Hercules and finally, like the bottom of a family
tree, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

What you have done is link
Buffy magically to something more primal and when you use her you will find
that she is 'connected' to all the symbols that you meditated on.

It might be interesting to
see if some of these symbols start to evolve in the direction that you
meditated on. You might pick up a Buffy
comic and see a story line which reflects your meditation. In magical terms it would be a good 'check on
earth' that the links have been properly made as others who work with the Buffy
image will have started to pick up on the same connections. Again that would be a matter for experiment, but
from your perspective when you tap into that image you will be free from a lot
of the bollocks that surrounds popular culture icons and rooted into a divine
reality. Because you have seen those
links between Buffy and 'Jeff' you can believe in them and because you have
felt the depth of the links between her and him you benefit from the depth of
the symbol.

This technique can be applied
to any popular culture symbol, from Star Trek to and Andy Warhol tin of soup.
But as an experiment I suggest you do a ritual using the pop culture symbols
and then try and linking an iconic set before trying something else. Take the
whole cast of Buffy, or the Bridge of the Enterprise, the Jerry Springer show,
a range of cars, anything. Then use them as magical symbols to see if you can
improve them by linking them to the Divine.
It does make watching the shows, or car spotting a completely out of
this world experience.